Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto, leading character in the TV-series The Bear, is obsessed with his calling. The rare moments when he’s away from the kitchen, he fills notebook after notebook with recipes, beautiful drawings of exotic dishes, newspaper clippings; anything food-related.
These books aren’t private diaries; when Marcus, the pastry chef, is looking for inspiration, Carmy tells him to flick through “the New York notebook”, which is kept at hand in the little office at the back of the kitchen. (The notebook is named after New York, because it covers the time when Carmy worked at a three star restaurant in that city).
Marcus doesn’t find exactly what he was looking for, perhaps, but he does find a great conversation starter (the conversation is about what chefs mean by the word “legacy”, which also happens to be the title of the episode in question (S3, E7)).
Carmy might not be aware, but he’s actually in the habit of commonplacing. This verb—unfamiliar to a modern reader—reflects the fact that keeping a “commonplace book” was once a universal practice, to the extent that in the seventeenth century, formal techniques for maintaining such books was even taught at institutions like Oxford.
By that time, the phenomenon was already well established. Leonardo da Vinci describes his commonplace book as:
A collection without order, drawn from many papers, which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them later each in its place, according to the subjects of which they treat.
Carmy isn’t the first fictional character to commonplace, either. Sherlock Holmes, for example, would have gotten nowhere without his own version of a commonplace book, where he meticulously gathered information essential to his detective work.
There are many reasons why you’d want to keep a commonplace book. Susan Miller, in her work Assuming the Positions: Cultural Pedagogy and the Politics of Commonplace Writing, argues that women historically kept them both in order to reinforce and to revise the roles imposed on them by gender and social conventions.
Beyond identity-building, the habit of commonplacing can also be conducive to nurturing what Steven Johnson calls “slow hunches”. Johnson popularised this idea in his book Where Good Ideas Come From : the natural history of innovation, where he describes it as follows:
Most hunches that turn into important innovations unfold over much longer time frames. They start with a vague, hard-to-describe sense that there’s an interesting solution to a problem that hasn’t yet been proposed, and they linger in the shadows of the mind, sometimes for decades, assembling new connections and gaining strength… But that long incubation period is also their strength, because true insights require you to think something that no one has thought before in quite the same way. […] Because slow hunches need so much time to develop, they are fragile creatures, easily lost to the more pressing needs of day-to-day issues. Sustaining the slow hunch is less a matter of perspiration than of cultivation
The problem with slow hunches is that, being murky, they run a high risk of failing to develop into something tangible. They can simply pass in and out of our memory too quickly. That’s where the commonplace book can help. Johnson illustrates this by describing how the idea of natural selection gradually came into Charles Darwin’s view, thanks in large part to his habit of commonplacing:
Darwin adhered to a rigourous practice of maintaining notebooks where he quoted other sources. He was constantly rereading his notes, discovering new implications. His ideas emerged as a kind of duet between the present-tense thinking brain and all those past observations recorded on paper.
The American historian Robert Darnton also explores the practice of commonplacing in his book The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future. He, too, emphasizes the importance of revisiting old entries:
Each rereading of the commonplace book becomes a new kind of revelation. Each encounter holds the promise that some long-forgotten hunch will connect in a new way with some emerging obsession.
I myself am a compulsive note taker since as long as I can remember. I’ve written previously about how commonplacing can often be cyclical, and also how there can be a slow but ultimately constructive loop between digital notes morphing into physical shape, and vice versa. (The referenced post also touches on carpentry as a way of manifesting your ‘notes’ in 3D).
Speaking of previous writing, the one text on this blog that draws the most readers by far, is called Why I Won’t Use The Best Software, Even When It’s Free.
Its popularity suggests that I’m not alone in looking for the optimal system. In this particular case that system happens to be software, but people have been seeking the best way to structure their commonplace books long before computers existed to assist with personal knowledge management.
As early as 1685, John Locke published A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books, which was basically a manual for how to arrange random material by subject and category. About a century later, printer, bookseller and typographer John Bell came up with the brilliant idea of publishing what we would today call bullet-journals, based on the template set forth by Locke. Despite its unwieldy title—Bell’s Common-Place Book, Formed generally upon the Principles Recommended and Practised by Mr Locke—the book was an instant success.
The problem with commonplacing, then as now, is that it tends to get very complex. It’s one thing to have the stamina and self-discipline to even consistently make entries, but the real challenge is keeping those entries organized and searchable. If one isn’t careful, it’s easy to end up doing little more than curating a collection of stale notes, which obviously defeats the entire purpose of having a commonplace book in the first place.
So how do you deal with that dilemma?
Personally, I’ve found that a stacked approach works well. Just as the human brain has lower, primitive functions with more sophisticated and orderly layers on top, so do my notes.
It starts with scribbles in the margins of books, newspapers and magazines. Those have very short shelf-life, in the sense that I’ll soon forget what fleeting associations I meant to capture with them.
Then there’s the slightly more structured, but still “for my eyes only” digital repository of notes (I’ve finally transitioned from Evernote to Obsidian for this).
One level up from there, I write records. Those are fairly scattered, but they’re usually organised in something like a key-value pair format. As in: this thing made me think of that thing.
(For instance: how benchmarking different types of quantum computers made me think of Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying, or how one physicist’s explanation of time made me see the seasonal shifting of Swedish weather in a new light.)
Yet another step up from records are posts, like this one.
Then further up the hierarchy are newsletters, where I try to contextualise how different posts and records are linked. (For example, only recipients of Slow News will know the common denominator between my recent conversations with Sara García Alonso and Guido Tonelli)
At the very highest layer however, there’s no such thing as “knowledge management”. Whatever we put in our notebooks (or on our blogs) is merely a reflection of our lived experience. And that’s exactly what should make a commonplace book interesting.